How to Set up Keyword Redirects
How to Set up Keyword Redirects
Why should you do it?
Sometimes customers who visit your site aren’t necessarily looking for a product. Though not a direct revenue driver, how your site treats these customers as part of your larger digital experience is a key piece in building trust and loyalty. Are the search terms “help”, “return policy”, or any other keywords that aren’t a particular product frequently showing up in your top keyword results? If your answer is yes, the solution is using: Keyword Redirects.
Redirects allow you to bypass the usual product search results and take a customer directly to a page of your choosing if they search for a particular word or phrase. Some Algolia customers also use this feature to redirect users to category or brand pages. This can work well, but be sure to set up rules using exact-match or you may find it produces unexpected results.
NOTE: There are two ways to set up keyword redirects in Algolia. One is using the Manual Editor and the other is using Merchandising Studio, which is available for some customers. Either option requires a simple front end development work to be in place for the keyword redirect to be triggered. Check with your Development team to have it set up.
- From the Merchandising Studio homepage, click Visual merchandiser in the left-hand navigation.
- Enter the keyword you'd like to create a redirect for in the search field. In this example, let's use "help".
- Click the Curate this query button.
- Click Redirect
- Enter the URL to redirect your query keyword to, then click Apply
- Click the Review and Publish button
- Review your trigger (in this case, the keyword query you're setting up the redirect for) and consequence (in this case, the redirect URL). Optional, but recommended for easy reference later: add the rule description (for example: "Redirects search term 'help' to customer service page").
- If all looks good, click Publish. This will enable the Rule to take effect immediately.
Great merchandisers always test their updates! To test your new keyword redirect: visit your live site and enter the keyword you just set the redirect for in your search field. You should be redirected to the URL you entered previously.
- Load dashboard section: Rules
- Select the correct index
- Click on “New Rule” button and select “Manual Editor”
- In the Condition(s) section, keep Query toggled on, select Is/Contains/Starts with/Ends within the dropdown and enter a query (e.g. “star wars”) in the input field.
- In the Consequence(s) section, click the Add consequence button and select Return Custom Data.
- In the input field that appears, add the data to return when the user query matches the Rule in the following format:
- { “redirect”: “https://www.mystore.com/#q=user-query” }
- For example, for the query “star wars” the custom data consequence will look like this:
- { "redirect": "https://www.mystore.com/#q=star+wars" }
- Optional: add rule description for clarity and define a timeframe for the promotional campaign.
- Review the rule before saving